basic research and clinical data in an attempt to derive a cohesive model which explains the behavioral effects of the drug. Johnson is an experimental psychologist, and his work underlies many of the chapters which suggest that lithium decreases the behavioral response to novel external stimuli. He then utilizes this foundation to propose a cognitive model for lithium's anti-manic action, its inhibition of violent impulsivity, and its prophylactic effects in recurrent depression. Previous formulations which were clinically based, such as that of Mabel Blake Cohen and her associates, stressed the primacy of depression and noted the \"manic defense\" as an attempt to ward off intolerable depression. In direct contrast, Johnson views mania as the primary disturbance in bipolar disorder. He considers depression in bipolar disease as an over-zealous homeostatic inhibitory responsf to a maniaassociated cognitive overload. Consistent with this, he believes, lit lum exerts its anti-manic effect by decreasing cognitive processing in a manner analogous to his animal studies. Johnson also suggests that lithium exerts its prophylactic effect in recurrent depressions by treating subclinical mania. These concepts are supported by the work of Johnson's associate, Kukopulos, to whom the book is dedicated. The bulk of the research which describes the cognitive disturbance in mania is complex, however, and uncomfortably open to multiple interpretations. Recognized as a preliminary effort, Johnson's formulation may help to guide further research. Although Johnson clearly traces lithium actions through a broad range of subjects, his discussion of the neurophysiological aspects of this drug is notably spotty. In particular, Johnson ignores the work of Svensson, DeMontigny, Aghajanian, and others who suggest that serotonergic systems may play an important role in the antidepressant actions of lithium. As a result, he fails to discuss one of the most important current uses of lithium: as an agent used in conjunction with antidepressant medications to increase treatment response in medication-resistant forms of depression. Lithium augmentation of antidepressant medication also challenges the formulation presented by Johnson. This formulation suggests that lithium should have no therapeutic value in patients, such as those with endogenous depression, who already \"under-process\" cognitive information. The omission of lithium augmentation in depression is clearly unfortunate in this text. Overall, this volume demonstrates the benefits of a single-authored text. It it clearly organized and readable. The bibliography is also broad and useful. In this book, Johnson primarily addresses a research audience, and his model seems designed to stimulate thought rather than to improve clinical technique. In this capacity, his book will be of most interest to behavioral psychologists. Other books, focusing purely on clinical data, may be more useful to clinicians. Nevertheless, the clear organization, the large bibliography, and the thoughtful presentation may make this text a useful addition to a clinical library as well.

The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World.

L'A. s'efforce d'envisager la nature de la «socialite» et des relations sociales au sein des societes contemporaines marquees par des processus d'individualisation. Il se demande ce que signifie la notion d'individualisation, analyse les processus de transition post-sociale et met en lumiere certains phenomenes de «desocialisation». Il considere que les societes contemporaines vont voir emerger certains elements culturels tels l'expertise ou le savoir qui vont jouer un role de plus en plus important dans leur organisation. Il estime que les «relations d'objet» vont tendre a devenir de plus en plus constitutives des relations sociales. Il s'efforce de definir et de caracteriser les specificites d'une socialite centree sur l'objet et met en exergue les notions de mutualite et de solidarite dans ce cadre

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Sociality with Objects : Social Relations in Postsocial Knowledge Societies

Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy. By Bruno Latour. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004; pp. x + 307. $55.00 cloth; $24.95 paper. The academic study of environmental ethics, particularly of "deep ecology," has generated extensive scholarly discussion in recent years. Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences Into Democracy, by French author Bruno Latour, brings a fascinating and bold new twist to contemporary discussions about the nature of "nature." Latour proposes a radical shift in current conceptions of "political ecology," arguing that mainstream environmental movements are doomed to fail so long as they envision political ecology as inextricably tied to the protection and management of nature through political methodologies and policies. Instead, political ecology should abandon socially constructed representations of nature as an uncontrollable monolith. The former perspective is dangerous, Latour argues, because it enables science to silence public deliberation about ecological issues and close off options to prevent pending environmental crises. The rhetoric of science, whose credibility emanates from the dual sources of indisputable expertise and dire warnings, paralyzes the polis. Unable to contest scientific fact, and faced with pending environmental cataclysm, public and political discussion centered on the inevitable question of "What next?" becomes stagnant and devoid of solutions. In the first chapter, Latour argues that "nature is the chief obstacle that has hampered the development of public discourse" (9). Nature, or at least the agreed-upon external reality that is often represented as nature, allows science to render the public sphere voiceless. Unqualified to objectively test and observe natural facts, the polis is relegated to the sidelines, and engages in endless quibbling about matters of value which are a rung lower on the hierarchy of social concerns. The hegemony of science and the god-like status of the scientist, who is the only legitimate liaison between the natural world and the public, render meaningful political discourse impotent. "[T]he Scientist can go back and forth from one world to the other no matter what: the passageway closed to all others is open to him alone" (11). Latour concludes this chapter by examining how Western societies, particularly the United States, use nature to order and organize political life. Uncontestable facts of nature, and rhetoric that represents nature as something to be controlled, protected, or managed, permeate everyday political discourse and decision-making to a degree not seen in other cultures. Having thrown off the yoke of nature, Latour sketches one precondition for a more communal and sustainable political ecology in chapter 2. Here, a critique of anthropocentrism is used to cast off false, socially constructed distinctions between human and nonhuman, including animals and inanimate objects like rocks and trees. Of particular interest to rhetorical scholars, Latour also criticizes at length the modernist belief that speech and the capacity for rational thought distinguish humans from nonhumans. Instead, he posits that political ecology must be recast as a collective of beings both human and nonhuman, both capable of speech and mute: "a slight displacement of our attention suffices to show that nonhumans, too, are implicated in a great number of speech impedimenta" (62-63). This rethinking of the public collective is necessary to prevent scientists from imposing the idea that they definitively represent and speak for nature (the mute objects that they seek so earnestly to protect). …

Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy

As far back as we know, there have been individuals inca-pacitated by memories that have filled them with sadness and remorse, fright and horror, or a sense of irreparable loss. Only recently, however, have people tormented with such recollections been diagnosed as suffering from "post-traumatic stress disorder". Here Allan Young traces this malady, particularly as it is suffered by Vietnam veterans, to its beginnings in the emergence of ideas about the unconscious mind and to earlier manifestations of traumatic memory like shell shock or traumatic hysteria. In Young's view PTSD is not a timeless or universal phenomemon newly discovered. Rather, it is a "harmony of illusions, a cultural product gradually put together by the practices, technologies, and narratives with which it is diagnosed, studied, and treated and by the various interests, institutions, and moral arguments mobilising these efforts. This book is part history and part ethnography, and it includes a detailed account of everyday life in a psychiatric unit specialising in the treatment of Vietnam veterans with PTSD. To illustrate his points, Young presents a number of fascinating transcripts of the group therapy and diagnostic sessions that he observed firsthand over a period of two years. Through his comments and the tran-scripts themselves, the reader becomes familiar with the individual hospital personnel and clients and their struggle to make sense of life after a tragic war. One observes that everyone on the unit is heavily invested in the PTSD diagnosis: boundaries between therapist and patient are as unclear as were the distinctions between victim and victimizer in the jungles of Southeast Asia.

The Harmony of Illusions: Inventing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.@@@Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory.

We all know that we have and are our bodies. But might it be possible to leave this common place? In the present article we try to do this by attending to the way we do our bodies. The site where we look for such action is that of handling the hypoglycaemias that sometimes happen to people with diabetes. In this site it appears that the body, active in measuring, feeling and countering hypoglycaemias is not a bounded whole: its boundaries leak. Bits and pieces of the outside get incorporated within the active body; while the centre of some bodily activities is beyond the skin. The body thus enacted is not self-evidently coherent either. There are tensions between the body?s organs; between the control under which we put our bodies and the erratic character of their behaviour; and between the various needs and desires single bodies somehow try to combine. Thus to say that a body is a whole, or so we conclude, skips over a lot of work. One does not hang together as a matter of course: keeping oneself together is something the embodied person needs to do. The person who fails to do so dies.

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Embodied action, enacted bodies: The example of hypoglycaemia

Summary: This article develops a model of action that outlines a 'pragmatic' approach to conventions, while establishing links with universalist or cultural approaches. It clarifies the scope of the sociological pragmatics concerned with analysing the different procedures by which people establish a link between their personal experience, traces of the past revealed in the environment, and their horizons of expectation. It advances the hypothesis that several systems of thought and behaviour combine during the course of action, and then explores the architecture of these systems by examining their articulation in time and their distribution in space.

The conventional foundations of action. Elements of a sociological pragmatics

L'article etudie la transformation des relations entre les membres d'une association de victimes frappes par un drame collectif. Il part de l'exemple d'un groupe de parents constitues autour des troubles de la croissance de leurs enfants, et dont les traitements, contamines par un agent pathogene, s'averent responsables d'une maladie mortelle qui frappe certains d'entre eux. L'article explore deux questions: le rapport a la democratie de ce collectif de victimes ; la maniere dont, construit autour d'une premiere situation de violence, le collectif est en mesure d'accueillir en son sein les victimes d'une deuxieme situation de violence.

Violence et démocratie au sein d'un collectif de victimes. Les rigueurs de l'entraide

The social sciences have much to gain by paying particular attention to the place that dispositifs occupy in social life. The utility of such a perspective is clear from an examination of the research that has made use of this notion since the end of the 1970s. Yet in addition to the wide variety of definitions and objectives relating to the concept of dispositif, a reading of these works also reveals some of the difficulties that have been encountered along the way. An effort to clarify and renew the discussion on both the conceptual and methodological levels is thus worthwhile, and this article is a contribution to that end. The first section sets out the results of our conceptual inquiry into the notion of dispositif. The second puts forward a series of propositions designed to develop a “processual” approach to dispositifs. Finally, we return to several studies that we have conducted from this perspective relating to the dispositifs of redress, looking at the doctrinal work of jurists around a criminal trial, the practices of lawyers in the courtroom, the reactions of victims of a medical scandal to a compensation fund, and the historical transformation of dispositifs of redress for medical accidents since the beginning of the nineteenth century. This enables us to clarify the approach we propose and to suggest new avenues for the future.

The Force of Dispositifs

Nicolas Dodier : Die Krankheit und der Arbeitsplatz. ; ; Der Aufsatz beschaftigt sich mit der Untersuchung der Frage, welche Logik zwischen der individuellen Krankheit und den Interaktionen des Arbeitsplatzes besteht. Ausgehend von Gesprachen mit 25 Personen (Angestellte und fuhrende Angestellte) untersucht der Verfasser den Prozess der moralischen Einschatzung des Kranken oder des von den anderen als krank bezeichneten Mitarbeiters. Er unterstreicht innerhalb dieses Prozesses die Bedeutung der Moglichkeit des Betroffenen, seine Arbeit zu modulieren (Zeit- und Kraftaufwand) und er zeigt die Rolle zweier wichtiger Urteilskriterien : der Vorrat des « Krankschreibens » und der Vorrat des « Krankseins ». Die Krankheit kann andererseits als Vorwand benutzt werden zur Berechtigung von Strategien, die in Wirklichkeit auf den Arbeitsbeziehungen beruhen. Allgemein kann gesagt werden, dass die moralische Position des Betroffenen an seinem Arbeitsplatz von der Krankheit im Verlauf der sozialen Interaktionen ins Spiel gesetzt wird.

La maladie et le lieu de travail

This article looks at the AIDS-related controversy surrounding the experiments on and the availability of medicines in southern countries. It situates these debates in a longer-term history of transnational medicine. It highlights the rise of international therapeutic modernity at the beginning of the 1990s, based on the strict regulation of clinical trials and on the formalization of the international ethical rules governing experiments. This rise helped to change radically the reception of experiments conducted in southern countries around AIDS. With regard to this new ethics applied to clinical trials in southern countries, this article goes on to demonstrate the confrontation at the end of the 1990s between two different approaches to the universalization of healthcare. Finally, it shows how new laws on international trade have reinitiated this confrontation. Through this story, the article suggests in what sense the study of the political transformations of transnational medicine could offer a new field of investigation for the social sciences.

Nicolas Dodier

Papers

The conventional foundations of action. Elements of a sociological pragmatics

Violence et démocratie au sein d'un collectif de victimes. Les rigueurs de l'entraide

The Force of Dispositifs

La maladie et le lieu de travail

Transnational medicine in public arenas: AIDS treatments in the South.